Here in the southern hemisphere we know that winter is on its way when we see the Southern Cross (Crux) and other celestial wonders riding high up in the southern sky at midnight.
I have an observatory at a place in western Queensland where we have extremely dark skies and I'm able to capture the beauty of our night sky with just a camera and wide field lens on top of a tracking telescope.
This image shows the pointers to the cross known as Alpha and Beta Centauri, then the Southern Cross (Crux) in its entirety and then the pretty pink nebulous stellar area around the star called Eta Carinae known as the Eta Carina Nebula.
This star is in the end throes of its stellar life and it’s pumping out astronomical amounts of gas (excuse the pun J) as it fights its gravitational battle, many astronomers worldwide are keeping a close eye on this star as its one that will eventually go Supernova!
At the bottom of the image is an unusual dark streak known as the Doodad nebula, I was very happy to have captured this funny named object too :-)
This image was taken at my Stardust Observatory on the 10th March 2019 with a Canon 70D camera and a 18-400mm Tamron lens set at 23mm and F4.5 (the image is slightly cropped).
There were 12 x 3 minutes images stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and ISO1600. The camera was being tracked on top of a larger telescope set up in the observatory.
I have an observatory at a place in western Queensland where we have extremely dark skies and I'm able to capture the beauty of our night sky with just a camera and wide field lens on top of a tracking telescope.
This image shows the pointers to the cross known as Alpha and Beta Centauri, then the Southern Cross (Crux) in its entirety and then the pretty pink nebulous stellar area around the star called Eta Carinae known as the Eta Carina Nebula.
This star is in the end throes of its stellar life and it’s pumping out astronomical amounts of gas (excuse the pun J) as it fights its gravitational battle, many astronomers worldwide are keeping a close eye on this star as its one that will eventually go Supernova!
At the bottom of the image is an unusual dark streak known as the Doodad nebula, I was very happy to have captured this funny named object too :-)
This image was taken at my Stardust Observatory on the 10th March 2019 with a Canon 70D camera and a 18-400mm Tamron lens set at 23mm and F4.5 (the image is slightly cropped).
There were 12 x 3 minutes images stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and ISO1600. The camera was being tracked on top of a larger telescope set up in the observatory.
I used my Meade LX200 10inch to track the camera piggybacked on top of the telescope which was at a very difficult angle (upside down) so it was a bit of back breaking work to focus the camera.
But it was worth it as I got the pictures :-)
But it was worth it as I got the pictures :-)
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